I take this occasion in front of this historic building, where you have paid me the
high honour of awarding me the Philadelphia Liberty Medal as an invitation to set my own
sights equally high. I would like, therefore, to turn my thoughts today to the state of
the world and the prospects that lie before it. I have also decided to do something that
personally I find just as demanding: I will attempt to address you in English. I hope you
will understand me.

There are thinkers who claim that if the modern age began with the discovery of
America, it also ended in America. This is said to have occurred in the year 1969, when
America sent the first men to the moon. From this historical moment, they say, a new age
in the life of humanity can be dated.

I think there are good reasons for suggesting that the modern age has ended. Today,
many things indicate that we are going through a transitional period, when it seems that
something is on the way out and something else is painfully being born. It is as if
something were crumbling, decaying and exhausting itself, while something else, still
indistinct, were arising from the rubble.

Periods of history when values undergo a fundamental shift are certainly not
unprecedented. This happened in the Hellenistic period, when from the ruins of the
classical world the Middle Ages were gradually born. It happened during the Renaissance,
which opened the way to the modern era. The distinguishing features of such transitional
periods are a mixing and blending of cultures, and a plurality or parallelism of
intellectual and spiritual worlds. These are periods when all consistent value systems
collapse, when cultures distant in time and space are discovered or rediscovered. They are
periods when there is a tendency to quote, to imitate and to amplify, rather than to state
with authority or integrate. New meaning is gradually born from the encounter, or the
intersection, of many different elements.

Today, this state of mind or of the human world is called post-modernism. For me, a
symbol of that state is a Bedouin mounted on a camel and clad in traditional robes under
which he is wearing jeans, with a transistor radio in his hands and an ad for Coca-Cola on
the camel's back. I am not ridiculing this, nor am I shedding an intellectual tear over
the commercial expansion of the West that destroys alien cultures. I see it rather as a
typical expression of this multicultural era, a signal that an amalgamation of cultures is
taking place. I see it as proof that something is happening, something is being born, that
we are in a phase when one age is succeeding another, when everything is possible. Yes,
everything is possible because our civilization does not have its own unified style, its
own spirit, its own aesthetic.

This is related to the crisis, or to the transformation, of science as the basis of the
modern conception of the world.

The dizzying development of this science, with its unconditional faith in objective
reality and its complete dependency on general and rationally knowable laws, led to the
birth of modern technological civilization. It is the first civilization in the history of
the human race to span the entire globe and firmly bind together all human societies,
submitting them to a common global destiny. It was this science that enabled man, for the
first time, to see Earth from space with his own eyes, that is, to see it as another star
in the sky.

At the same time, however, the relationship to the world that modern science fostered
and shaped now appears to have exhausted its potential. It is increasingly clear that,
strangely, the relationship is missing something. It fails to connect with the most
intrinsic nature of reality, and with natural human experience. It is now more of a source
of disintegration and doubt than a source of integration and meaning. It produces what
amounts to a state of schizophrenia, completely alienating man as an observer from himself
as a being. Classical modern science described only the surface of things, a single
dimension of reality. And the more dogmatically science treated it as the only dimension,
as the very essence of reality, the more misleading it became. Today, for instance, we may
know immeasurably more about the universe than our ancestors did, and yet, it increasingly
seems they knew something more essential about it than we do, something that escapes us.
The same thing is true of nature and of ourselves. The more thoroughly all our organs and
their functions, their internal structure and the biochemical reactions that take place
within them are described, the more we seem to fail to grasp the spirit, purpose and
meaning of the system that they create together and that we experience as our unique
"self."

And thus today we find ourselves in a paradoxical situation. We enjoy all the
achievements of modern civilization that have made our physical existence on this earth
easier in so many important ways. Yet we do not know exactly what to do with ourselves,
where to turn. The world of our experiences seems chaotic, disconnected, confusing. There
appear to be no integrating forces, no unified meaning, no true inner understanding of
phenomena in our experience of the world. Experts can explain anything in the objective
world to us, yet we understand our own lives less and less. In short, we live in the
post-modern world, where everything is possible and almost nothing is certain.

This state of affairs has its social and political consequences. The single planetary
civilization to which we all belong confronts us with global challenges. We stand helpless
before them because our civilization has essentially globalized only the surface of our
lives. But our inner self continues to have a life of its own. And the fewer answers the
era of rational knowledge provides to the basic questions of human Being, the more deeply
it would seem that people, behind its back as it were, cling to the ancient certainties of
their tribe. Because of this, individual cultures, increasingly lumped together by
contemporary civilization, are realizing with new urgency their own inner autonomy and the
inner differences of others. Cultural conflicts are increasing and are understandably more
dangerous today than at any other time in history. The end of the era of rationalism has
been catastrophic. Armed with the same supermodern weapons, often from the same suppliers,
and followed by television cameras, the members of various tribal cults are at war with
one another. By day, we work with statistics; in the evening, we consult astrologers and
frighten ourselves with thrillers about vampires. The abyss between the rational and the
spiritual, the external and the internal, the objective and the subjective, the technical
and the moral, the universal and the unique, constantly grows deeper.

Politicians are rightly worried by the problem of finding the key to ensure the
survival of a civilization that is global and at the same time clearly multicultural; of
how generally respected mechanisms of peaceful coexistence can be set up, and on what set
of principles they are to be established.

These questions have been highlighted with particular urgency by the two most important
political events in the second half of the twentieth century: the collapse of colonial
hegemony and the fall of communism. The artificial world order of the past decades has
collapsed and a new, more just order has not yet emerged. The central political task of
the final years of this century, then, is the creation of a new model of coexistence among
the various cultures, peoples, races and religious spheres within a single interconnected
civilization. This task is all the more urgent because other threats to contemporary
humanity brought about by one-dimensional development of civilization are growing more
serious all the time.

Many believe this task can be accomplished through technical means. That is, they
believe it can be accomplished through the invention of new organizational, political and
diplomatic instruments. Yes, it is clearly necessary to invent organizational structures
appropriate to the present multicultural age. But such efforts are doomed to failure if
they do not grow out of something deeper, out of generally held values.

This, too, is well-known. And in searching for the most natural source for the creation
of a new world order, we usually look to an area that is the traditional foundation of
modern justice and a great achievement of the modern age: to a set of values that among
other things were first declared in this building. I am referring to respect for the
unique human being and his or her liberties and inalienable rights, and the principle that
all power derives from the people. I am, in short, referring to the fundamental ideas of
modern democracy.

What I am about to say may sound provocative, but I feel more and more strongly that
not even these ideas are enough, that we must go farther and deeper. The point is that the
solution they offer is still, as it were, modern, derived from the climate of the
Enlightenment and from a view of man and his relation to the world that has been
characteristic of the Euro-American sphere for the last two centuries. Today, however, we
are in a different place and facing a different situation, one to which classically modern
solutions in themselves do not give a satisfactory response. After all, the very principle
of inalienable human rights, conferred on man by the Creator, grew out of the typically
modern notion that man as a being capable of knowing nature and the world was the pinnacle
of creation and lord of the world. This modern anthropocentrism inevitably meant that He
who allegedly endowed man with his inalienable rights began to disappear from the world.
He was so far beyond the grasp of modern science that he was gradually pushed into a
sphere of privacy of sorts, if not directly into a sphere of private fancy that is, to a
place where public obligations no longer apply. The existence of a higher authority than
man himself simply began to get in the way of human aspirations.

The idea of human rights and freedoms must be an integral part of any meaningful world
order. Yet I think it must be anchored in a different place, and in a different way, than
has been the case so far. If it is to be more than just a slogan mocked by half the world,
it cannot be expressed in the language of a departing era, and it must not be mere froth
floating on the subsiding waters of faith in a purely scientific relationship to the
world.

Paradoxically, inspiration for the renewal of this lost integrity can once again be
found in science. In a science that is new let us say post-modern a science producing
ideas that in a certain sense allow it to transcend its own limits. I will give two
examples.

The first is the Anthropic Cosmological Principle. Its authors and adherents have
pointed out that from the countless possible courses of its evolution, the universe took
the only one that enabled life to emerge. This is not yet proof that the aim of the
universe has always been that it should one day see itself through our eyes. But how else
can this matter be explained?

I think the Anthropic Cosmological Principle brings us to an idea perhaps as old as
humanity itself: that we are not at all just an accidental anomaly, the microscopic
caprice of a tiny particle whirling in the endless depths of the universe. Instead, we are
mysteriously connected to the entire universe, we are mirrored in it, just as the entire
evolution of the universe is mirrored in us. Until recently it might have seemed that we
were an unhappy bit of mildew on a heavenly body whirling in space among many that have no
mildew on them at all. This was something that classical science could explain. Yet the
moment it begins to appear that we are deeply connected to the entire universe, science
reaches the outer limits of its powers. Because it is founded on the search for universal
laws, it cannot deal with singularity, that is, with uniqueness. The universe is a unique
event and a unique story, and so far we are the unique point of that story. But unique
events and stories are the domain of poetry, not science. With the formulation of the
Anthropic Cosmological Principle, science has found itself on the border between formula
and story, between science and myth. In that, however, science has paradoxically returned,
in a roundabout way, to man, and offers him in new clothing his lost integrity. It does so
by anchoring him once more in the cosmos.

The second example is the Gaia Hypothesis. This theory brings together proof that the
dense network of mutual interactions between the organic and inorganic portions of the
Earth's surface form a single system, a kind of mega-organism, a living planet Gaia named
after an ancient goddess who is recognizable as an archetype of the Earth Mother in
perhaps all religions. According to the Gaia Hypothesis we are parts of a greater whole.
Our destiny is not dependent merely on what we do for ourselves but also on what we do for
Gaia as a whole. If we endanger her, she will dispense with us in the interests of a
higher value that is, life itself.

What makes the Anthropic Principle and the Gaia Hypothesis so inspiring? One simple
thing: both remind us, in modern language, of what we have long suspected, of what we have
long projected into our forgotten myths and what perhaps has always lain dormant within us
as archetypes. That is, the awareness of our being anchored in the Earth and the universe,
the awareness that we are not here alone nor for ourselves alone, but that we are an
integral part of higher, mysterious entities against whom it is not advisable to
blaspheme. This forgotten awareness is encoded in all religions. All cultures anticipate
it in various forms. It is one of the things that form the basis of man's understanding of
himself, of his place in the world, and ultimately of the world as such.

A modern philosopher once said: "Only a God can save us now."

Yes, the only real hope of people today is probably a renewal of our certainty that we
are rooted in the Earth and, at the same time, the cosmos. This awareness endows us with
the capacity for self-transcendence. Politicians at international forums may reiterate a
thousand times that the basis of the new world order must be universal respect for human
rights, but it will mean nothing as long as this imperative does not derive from the
respect of the miracle of Being, the miracle of the universe, the miracle of nature, the
miracle of our own existence. Only someone who submits to the authority of the universal
order and of creation, who values the right to be a part of it and a participant in it,
can genuinely value himself and his neighbours, and thus honour their rights as well.

It logically follows that, in today's multicultural world, the truly reliable path to
coexistence, to peaceful coexistence and creative cooperation, must start from what is at
the root of all cultures and what lies infinitely deeper in human hearts and minds than
political opinion, convictions, antipathies or sympathies. It must be rooted in
self-transcendence. Transcendence as a hand reached out to those close to us, to
foreigners, to the human community, to all living creatures, to nature, to the universe;
transcendence as a deeply and joyously experienced need to be in harmony even with what we
ourselves are not, what we do not understand, what seems distant from us in time and
space, but with which we are nevertheless mysteriously linked because, together with us,
all this constitutes a single world; transcendence as the only real alternative to
extinction.

The Declaration of Independence, adopted 218 years ago in this building, states that
the Creator gave man the right to liberty. It seems man can realize that liberty only if
he does not forget the One who endowed him with it.

Speech given on the occasion of being awarded The Philadelphia
Liberty Medal, Philadelphia, July 4, 1994.